


Herd

by Nausicaa_E



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Attempted Abortion, Body Horror, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dysphoria, Forced Pregnancy, Gen, Helplessness, Inability to Abort, Inability to Commit Suicide, Loss of Intelligence, Loss of Society, Mentally Injured Children, Miscarriage, Pregnancy, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, The Extinction Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Flesh Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), devolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:55:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27614477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nausicaa_E/pseuds/Nausicaa_E
Summary: Oliver Banks was wrong. New humans are being created.It's not a good thing.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 35





	Herd

**Author's Note:**

> I deeply respect Jonathan Sims' decision to state that there are no new humans in this world of terror.
> 
> I also think it's interesting to explore an alternative.
> 
> This may have crossed the line from horror into trauma; if so, please let me know and we can discuss what I should do about it.

The farmhouse on Vienna Road is large and comfortable, squatting toadlike in a declivity of the land. The electricity went off weeks ago, but there’s enough tallow for candles, and it glows with warm light. There’s a clean well on the property, and the farm is prosperous enough that while its residents don’t have much in the way of choices, nobody goes hungry. And while there are screams and wails coming from the farmhouse, they’re the cries of healthy babies.

The beds in the farmhouse on Vienna Road are feather-soft, although that comfort quickly grows hollow in a bed that’s not hard enough to support your aching back. The fireplace roars, even if the fuel isn’t the nicest-smelling, but it’ll heat water that’ll make your feet stop aching for a while -- and boil it hot enough to sterilize the blood-soaked, shit-stained rags.

The routine is simple and demanding. A human can live forever on potatoes and milk, and potatoes need weeding and cows need milking. The chickens and vegetable gardens need tending, since some variety is necessary to keep the human brain from rebelling against its confines -- and, of course, there’s the work of keeping the house clean and bringing up the young ones as best the little community can.

Which isn’t, in Maggie Herrera’s opinion, very well.

Maggie used to be a teacher. Her job here was only supposed to be for the summer, but when the world stopped working, she got stuck here, and she’s started to get used to the grim logic of this place. Her meds keep refilling themselves; whatever keeps people working the farm needs her to not be paralyzed with despair, and, she suspects, it needs her brain in fine condition so she can see the large-scale horror, like the observer effect in quantum physics. She thinks that if she was less honest about being transgender, it wouldn’t refill her hormones -- but since she’s secure enough in her identity, it’s content to let her guts twist over the little inadequacies. She calls that unseen force the Farmer in the notes she scribbles in increasingly rare margins; she has a grudging respect for its sophistication, its ability to recognize how much worse “almost good enough” can be than “never good enough”.

And that, she thinks, is why she’s the only one with a flat belly.

* * *

Everybody else on the farm is pregnant. If they didn’t have a functioning uterus before, they do now. Sex usually leads to a pregnancy, even if the anatomy shouldn’t line up, but it's not required: if your womb is empty for long enough, it’s going to fill back up. On her good days, Maggie is horrified at the attack on the others’ dignity; on her bad days, she’s horrified by her own envy; on her _really_ bad days, she wonders if everybody else on the farm isn’t secretly some human-shaped animal plucked from the Farmer’s herd to torture her specifically. On the days when she can recognize the others’ humanity enough to be horrified for them, she’s grateful that nobody had ever had a miscarriage -- she imagines someone always carrying a baby but never to term, the horror of the _loss_ of one’s ability to give life rather than the continuation of its absence, the tiny graves piling up … it’s the sort of shit the Farmer would pull.

There are no graves on the farm. Maggie doesn’t know if there ever will be graves; she hasn’t seen the seasons change yet, just a constant gray November with the last of the harvest to be pulled in and winter rattling in the leafless branches of the snaking trees, and the other methods of death … haven’t worked.

Joseph tried to get out of his pregnancy that way. The blood gushed up from his arms like a burst pipe and continued to gush long after he should have been exsanguinated, but they scabbed over, and now his forearms are so covered in scar tissue a knife would just bounce off.

And Carey … the farmhouse at Vienna Road doesn’t talk about what happened to Carey, who’s doing much better now, even though her belly has scars that nobody will ever mistake for stretch marks. They don’t talk about what happened when the herbal didn’t work. They don’t talk about what happened when something attacked the knitting needle she tried to use when that didn’t work.

They don’t talk about the cancerous thing they dragged out to the barn before it got too big to move.

* * *

For all that -- for all the assault on autonomy, for all the Farmer’s tortures in mind and body -- there’s something worse.

There are monsters in the woods, everybody knows that. There are howls at night, and the darkness seems palpable; during the day, smoke comes over the trees, or sometimes the sound of gunfire. The cellars always feel cramped, the gray sky always feels too big, and they’ve found clumps of fist-sized wasp larvae in festering holes in the wood of the farmhouse. Maggie can’t stop herself from telling Little Red Riding Hood to the toddlers who’re growing up so _goddamn_ fast -- there’s hungry wolves just waiting to make a meal of some poor, innocent child -- and most of the time the kids go to bed with only whimpers and leftover emotions from the stories she tells instead of the protest she always saw at naptime back at the preschool.

Maggie only doubts that the adults are human on her worst days, but she doubts that the kids are fully human most of the time. They smile and laugh and play with her and are always calling for Maggie to tell them funny stories about an impossible world with so many stories and tools and delights, and she loves them all. She couldn’t ever harm them, nor wish harm upon them, but there’s something blank and placid in their eyes, something she can’t ever do enough to spark. They cry like a reflex; they never scowl. They rarely try to wander off the farm, and never more than once. They ask her “what” and “when” and “who”, but never “how” or “why”. Their play is repetitive, imitative, never innovative. They like to listen to stories, but they don’t act them out.

* * *

On her good days, she thinks it’s her fault, that it’s she who’s teaching them obedience, inability to question, that exploration is dangerous. She’s teaching them to stay here, where it’s safe, where they get fed, and never leave. She’s teaching them not to ask questions because she doesn’t have answers, she doesn’t have her books or the Internet, she just has her one-woman memory, and if she dies (if she can die), that memory’s going to gutter out like a tallow candle. Her marginalia are insufficient to repair these kids’ development, let alone to repair society. She doubts more than a quarter of the children born will learn to read -- there’s not enough time, there’s not enough people, there’s not enough manpower, not enough necessity for these last straggling remnants of humankind.

She knows how evolution works -- there’s no teleology, no advancement on some ladder. Traits only persist so long as they’re useful, and in this environment, intelligence has no adaptive value. Ants don’t need to think in order to farm aphids, after all. Some of the oldest kids still haven’t spoken yet, and she hopes to whatever gods are left they just have developmental disabilities, that it’s not a sign of a larger trend.

On her bad days, she knows it’s the Farmer.

* * *

The other thing the kids don’t do is fight. They don’t fight with their circumstances, and they don’t fight with each other. When something bad happens, they fall down and shake and cry; none of them lash out in anger.

She could accept their incuriosity as a result of limited circumstances, resources, caregivers. She could accept their strange play as a result of limited time and cross-generation socialization. She could even accept their lessened language skills as a sad product of natural evolution. She could mourn the passing of human civilization, and she’d still love the kids even if they did choose the path of dumb animals.

But she can’t accept that natural evolution would make people _docile_ . Natural evolution would mean at least _some_ kids tried to fight or flee instead of freeze. Natural evolution would make an animal try to remove the source of the fear, whether tugging loose or staying in the trap to remove the person who set it.

This is a sign of _domestication_. Doing nothing in the face of fear would be eliminated from the gene pool without some outside force to protect it.

* * *

She didn’t give the Farmer its name because she’s trapped on a farm. She gave it its name because she thinks it’s raising humans for food.


End file.
